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Comment by jltsiren | Hacker News Reader

This is one of the reasons why individualism and public health are fundamentally at odds.

Ethical questions become easier if you assume that all actions are intentional and made with full knowledge of the consequences. Unfortunately real people are biological organisms that may shed pathogens wherever they go. Your mere presence may be enough to harm other people, without your intention or knowledge.

Should we as a society allow people to endanger bystanders, if the known preventative measures cause more harm than good to the person taking them? Or should we require everyone to follow the best practices, if the benefits to the society sufficiently outweigh the harm to the individual?

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I don’t think this is a complex trade-off at all, precisely for the reasons in your second paragraph. The whole issue boils down to whether we should allow the powers that be a framework to criminalize being an unadulterated human. That path may be less salient in the short-term (particularly in the face of manufactured panic), but it’s far, far more terrifying in the long run.

My comment was not specific to covid vaccines.

Vaccines, like other preventative measures, have externalities. Public health debates are often about whether those externalities are significant enough that individuals should be asked / pressured / forced to take actions that may be harmful to them. If you only talk about the effects of a vaccine on the vaccinated individual, you are not really participating in the debate.

Can you give us an overview on what's currently known about the externalities of the covid vaccines? Specifically some quantification of their effect on another persons odds of getting infected/hospitalized/killed/long covid'ed would be particularly helpful.

My understanding is that it is miniscule, but I only see people say things like "well no vaccine is 100% effective" and leave it at that (which I don't see as particularly informative), or the other end of the spectrum "the evil clot shots never did anything but kill people and make money for big pharma" which is of course equally useless.

Everyone I know with the vaccine has still gotten (and presumably spread) COVID. Many of them multiple times. So you can't make this statement anymore, it's false.

That's a nice testimonial, but you do realize that anecdotal evidence is one of the weakest forms of evidence, right?

Let me try this then - https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/23/vaccinate.... The data shows that the majority of Covid deaths are from vaccinated people now. Better?

By a wide margin, of all the COVID deaths total, most of them were unvaccinated. COVID deaths in August were slightly more among the vaccinated, but there were relatively few total deaths in August, and most of the population is vaccinated. It remains true that if you are unvaccinated, you have a higher chance of dying of a COVID infection.

Look up “conditional probability rule”.

I wanted to make sure I corrected your claim that this was anecdotal. It's what the actual data says. Most people dying from Covid now are vaccinated. That doesn't mean nobody should get vaccinated. It doesn't mean everyone should get vaccinated. But saying something isn't true that clearly is, isn't helpful. Trust has been eroded enough by "the experts" already.

No, you’re missing the point in more than one way.

So personal experience is now anecdotal?

Yes, and always has been.

Then you are easily manipulated.

If you wont confront given information with your real experience, you could easily believe in anything that other says. And covid is exactly this case. How many healthy people died from covid that you personally knew?

I’m not sure if you’re being for real right now, but maybe you should just start by looking at the definition of “anecdotal evidence”. This is just what this is, by definition. I’m not sure what you’re going on about.

Isn't definition of anecdotal "less relevant"?

No.

Ok, what is the definition of "anecdotal" in this case? Funny?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anecdotal_evidence

Seriously, why bother commenting if you haven't got that far.

Dude.

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